When the Shuttle Endeavour launched yesterday at 08:56 EDT from Kennedy Space Center, I was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean flying home. Had I been a few hundred kilometers farther south I might have spotted it, assuming I was awake and on the left side of the plane. But some things are hard to plan.

Happily, photographer Trey Ratcliff thought ahead a bit more than I did, and took this astonishing picture of Endeavour roaring into the sky for the last time:

Sigh. So lovely! And so dreamlike… but that’s because he shot several photos and combined them using High Dynamic Range (HDR) processing. In a nutshell, you take three exposures. In one, you set the exposures and other settings for the dim parts of the scene, in another you expose for the brighter parts, and in a third you take the medium road. Combining them leads to this other-worldly, ethereal picture quality. [Update: as Trey himself notes in the comments below, this particular shot was not multiple-frame HDR, but shot as a single image. I assumed it was multiple shot HDR because a) he’s written tutorials about it and 2) it really looked like it to me! Mea culpa.]

I love how the Shuttle’s flame lights up the clouds, and the trail of smoke draws your eye from the bottom of the frame right into the spot where the cloud is afire. In my mind the mushroom-cloud symbolism is strong, but not on purpose and there’s no real obvious metaphoric connection. Funny though.

Trey’s other images are equally amazing and well worth your time perusing, too. You should also check out the pictures taken by Stefanie Gordon, who did happen to have a view from an airplane, and who tweeted her shots. They’re really cool!

These prove that even the cloud-covered launches are amazing. Here’s a unique view of the plume’s shadow on the thin cloud layer which, alongside Stefanie’s image, gives an interesting above-and-below perspective.http://www.flickr.com/photos/forthebirds/5726717452

I’am disappointed both your explanations of the photo. Process to turn images “pretty” is called tone mapping e.g. it’s algorithm to lighten dark parts of photo, and vice versa, darken light parts. Of course if image’s dynamic range is limited, those parts are one colored (over and under exposed) and for this High Dynamic Range is needed (e.g. combine multiple exposure). Trey’s photo is not really HDR photo having only maximum bit depth of original RAW image, so this is just tone mapped SDR photo. You both know this and this is science blog so…

(And now rant: I find original, only light curve corrected, photos more moving. Those photos have some contrast unlike most tone mapped (pastel puke) HDRIs, end of rant)

About an hour ago I saw two lights drift low across the northern sky. The brightest being the international space station and less bright the shuttle Endeavor approaching to link up. They passed into the earths shadow 1100kms north east of me in Sydney and 340Kms above Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland. It was great to see both together before they docked. I look forward to seeing them every night for at least the next 10 days.

@Trey: wouldn’t it have been impossible to make an HDR image from multiple exposures of a scene like this, anyway? Since the Shuttle and the smoke it leaves behind are moving so fast, so every exposure would be radically different?

Actually, come to think of it, it also reminds me of this quote from Penn Jillette: “Comedy timing is the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound over 3.7 miles at sea level: 17.505 seconds.”

You should really check out these photos, taken by one of the pilots on the plane. She had a heads up that they might be close and began taking photos right after it punched through the clouds. There’s a link to more photos as well: